Trying to solve problems like Maria

At my favorite local bookstore, the one that provides me with all the vintage awesomeness I’ve found, I saw this book on the dollar shelf. And because I am five years old, I took a picture of it. Of course I know that it is called “Pieces of a Dream”, but sue me for giggling over the fact that it could just as easily be called “Feces of a Dream” since the cover is torn. As Oprah can attest, poop is a well that will never run dry.

Also, after getting hairy looks from the Marlboro Red-smoking shopkeeper for taking camera phone pictures of his stock, I then purchased ten more vintage food books, thus ensuring that this blog will never lack for content ever again, and then he sold Book-Loving Companion The Idle Warriors which is about Lee Harvey Oswald before the Kennedy assassination. All in all, a successful shopping day.

The last time I ate bologna was the 1980s. I used to be a picky kid and one of my favorite sandwiches was bologna and mustard on white bread (hold the nutritional value). Ironic that “picky” as a kid is so vastly different from “picky” as an adult. The idea of eating bologna and knowing only that it’s basically a giant tube of organ gunk is horrifying. It’s hilarious that it was a-okay with me back then, and yet things like onions and coffee ice cream would make me recoil. Nowadays, I don’t think there’s any way I would touch the stuff, nor would it ever even occur to me that you could buy a 2 pound filet o’ bologna and rotisserie roast it. I feel like that would smell like a tire fire. (That seems to be a common theme in a lot of these recipes – how to recreate the feel/look/smell of something else for a haunted house. You want the smell of rubbery burning flesh? Make this here bologna. You want liquid shit? Mix this tomato and pea soup together. It would be a very intense haunted house.)

But you know what classes up a bologna dinner and makes it all okay? Waldorf salad.

Shaun of the Dead is one of my all-time favorite movies and when I read this description of Colonial Cheese (not to be confused with Colonel Cheese, a valiant war hero if ever there was one) it reminded me of – SPOILER ALERT – when Shaun’s mother gets attacked by a zombified neighbor and explains “He was a bit bitey.” Something tells me I’d prefer the bite of a zombie to the bite of this dip. Here’s a visual, in case the ingredients alone didn’t do it for you.

This introduction to the Dairy Board’s book about how to incorporate more dairy into your life is as ominous as the tiki drinks that accompany it. My favorite part is the one that references the importance of cheese and butter to one’s diet, which I certainly swear by, but I’m also no pillar of health. (Example: I am very, very hurtie today after doing a BASICS YOGA CLASS yesterday). I wish we still lived in an era where your health was threatened if you didn’t eat saturated fat.

“Cream and butter are, of course, higher in fat and the vitamins carried by fat and lower in water and milk protein. They too, are indispensable in the human larder as every great national emergency proves. Children deprived of them, as well as of milk, for any length of time show the serious physical results all their adult life.“

Keep calm and carry [butter] on [your person at all times, it’s a national emergency, ah DOY]! From now on, I’m going to imagine that anyone with a weak handshake probably didn’t get enough cream as a kid. I, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of those little individual shots of creamer. Pretty sure I drank about 10 of those during church coffee hour every Sunday between the ages of 5 and 10. (Note 1: Please refer back to Example 1 about not being able to get through BASICS YOGA WITHOUT SEARING PAIN IN THE CORE OF MY BEING and how maybe all that fat isn’t healthy after all.) But I do have a hearty handshake.

Just because I have the visual here, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this Frosted Melon Mold (frosted with plain old cream cheese, mixed with milk) might be one of the grosser things I’ve seen in a while. I also love the casual suggestion to “frost the entire outside of the melon” which I assume is peeled, slippery and completely impossible to frost, because when I hear “frost” I think “frosting”, i.e. sugary, pasty treat and since there is no sugar involved, this sounds more like a schmear of cream cheese situation. Schmear’s too ethnic for the 50’s though, I guess. I’m not a melon fan though so maybe I have this all wrong, but no matter how you spread it, this sounds terrible.

What I’m pretty sure I don’t have wrong is how bad the frozen, gelatin and mayo encased tomato-cucumber salad sounds. Without a visual aid, I honestly can’t picture how that would look, but texturally speaking, it’s making me gag just thinking about it. And then there’s the recipe for Swedish Fish Salad that includes hard-boiled eggs, raw yolks, and 1 cup of flaked cooked fish and that will make me gag some more, lose my appetite and wonder why I joined Weight Watchers when reading ancient, gelatin-based recipes is a perfectly reasonable way to lose your appetite. On the other hand, a salad that employs Swedish Fish candy sounds entirely delightful.

Not gonna lie, I really enjoy a good tuna melt (although I’d omit the hard-boiled eggs from this recipe because why would you do that?) and I kinda love the idea of an English muffin purse with cheese on top. Know what I don’t love? Hot yeasty muffins.